On Java's Prominence

Java rose to prominence in the early and the mid 90s by promising the 'code once run anywhere' doctrine. But, this promise has been largely unfulfilled..... Java is the only industry proven cross platform development language....

Java rose to prominence in the mid '90s (as no one outside of Sun used it
before the mid-'90s) not because of the promise of WORA, but because people
believed that it was less painful than C++ for many applications. (If you're
cynical, it's also because the one-ring circus which is the JCP piled lots of
companies into the everything-must-be-in-the-standard-library clown car because
no matter how cramped things were, none of them wanted Microsoft to own any
more de facto standards.)

While I'm sure there are a fair few Java developers who write code on
platforms other than their platforms of deployment, cross-platform development,
I don't believe that a significant number of stakeholders really care that, in
theory, you can deploy your web application to a different platform. I mean,
when you have the alphabet soup of Java APIs and XML applications spitting out
HTML, what's really important is that HTML is cross-platform, not that the bugs
in Java 1.1 or maybe 1.2 these days are about the same on Solaris as they are
on Windows.

(Or maybe I'm just bitter that I haven't burned my knees lately crouching over a Macbook Pro in some coffee shop with latte foam slowly congealing in my soul patch.)

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